ASUS’s Next-Gen ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme Motherboard Pictured With Intel Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU
Roberto states that he is currently under NDA with an unknown party, most probably Intel. He has posted pictures of his test equipment which includes an Intel Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU and ASUS’s next-generation ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme motherboard. First of all, let’s take about the latest flagship board from ASUS. The first thing that we can notice is that the ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme motherboard has a lot of resemblance to the existing Z690 Extreme motherboard. There are a few subtle changes such as the PCH and SSD heatsink/cover which now has a slightly different aesthetic than the dotted one we saw on the previous motherboard. The ASUS PCIe Q-Release button has also been moved away from the side cover and now sits between the DIMM.2 and the DDR5 slots. The rest of the board is mostly the same and we can see why that’s the case. The Z790 and Z690 chipsets aren’t different at all besides an increase in the number of PCIe 4.0 lanes. The Z790 motherboards don’t feature PCIe Gen 5.0 lanes coming directly from the CPU or chipset to feed the M.2 Gen 5.0 slots and those have to be split with the Discrete GPU if a vendor wants to add in Gen 5 M.2 SSD functionality. The Z790 Extreme will be amongst the many ASUS Z790 boards that will be available at launch next month. With the motherboard out of the way, let’s get back to the Intel Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU details shared by Roberto. He states that the wattage discussion regarding the Raptor Lake CPUs has been overhyped and all you need to do is to calibrate the DC load line in the BIOS which can result in much lower power figures. He states that the average power consumption of the Core i9-13900K with Load line calibration is 200W at full load and with overclock, the chip can hit up to 250 Watts. He also states that he tested the CPU on a $20 air-cooler at stock and the CPU peaked at 90 Degrees Celsius. Roberto also stated that he can hit 6.5 GHz at 1.45V using a good liquid cooler and that his chip is a golden sample so these results may not be applicable to most Raptor Lake CPUs. he also said that the P-Cores can hit 5.7 GHz and E-Cores can hit up to 4.4 GHz on the ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme motherboard with a Ring-bus frequency of 5.0 GHz. The memory used was ADATA’s XPG Lancer 32 GB DDR5-6000 CL40 “AX5U6000C4016G-DCLARBK” and it ran perfectly on the setup and was tuned down to CL36-104-34-29 CR2 timings. We have already seen benchmarks of Intel’s Core i9-13900K at clock speeds of up to 6.2 GHz and it looks like with some tuning the power consumption can be toned down significantly though we shall wait for final results since this is a golden sample we’re looking at. Intel’s 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs along with the Z790 motherboards are planned to launch next month on the 20th of October.
